Pseudoscience Friday: Bioresonance Testing

Having taken a brief midweek vacation, we’ve decided to try out a new weekly feature here at Medgadget. After the (mostly) positive response to our confrontation with the emWave PR department, we figured “Hey, why not do that every week?” As such, every Friday we’ll be bringing you the best in non-scientifically validated touchy-feely quackery. As always, we love to hear from our readers, so feel free to drop us some suggestions at: tips–at–www.medgadget.com.
Moving along, this week we present to you: Bioresonance Therapy. Originally stumbled across in The West Australian (in an article about finding your “true age,” certainly a candidate for next week’s feature), bioresonance testing and therapy is described as follows…

Bioresonance testing uses electrodes to measure the electrical resistance of acupuncture points, measuring energy levels and indicating the presence of disease, according to its supporters.
The medical community generally does not accept the accuracy of this and other energetic medicine devices.
According to energetic medicine, the body’s health depends on information fields on the energetic or quantum field level, or what we simply refer to as energy. This philosophy teaches that any disease or poor health condition is basically a disruption or distortion in the energy field.
Natureco naturopath Samantha Warner believes the device does work at both a diagnostic and treatment level but agrees there is no science to prove it.

It’s too bad that not everyone is so willing to disclaim the “science” behind the technology. Searching for “Bioresonance Testing” brought up some lofty claims from the Integrative Health Center…

Modern Biophysics has shown that cells resonate at certain frequencies and have radio-like transmitting and receiving properties. These cells inter-communicate and control biological and chemical systems in the body. Healthy harmonic cells resonate at a very different frequency to that of unhealthy cells. Physicists further discovered that by inverting the disharmonic frequency a neutralizing effect took place, freeing cells and organs of accumulated metabolic waste and toxins. Harmonic wavelengths resonate at between 10 Hz and 150 kHz. This is called homeostasis, in other words healthy function. Bacteria, viruses, allergies, fungi, waste toxins, hormonal imbalances, an improper stress response and electromagnetic pollution from various sources can all obstruct and interfere with cell resonance and function of similar wave lengths. These severely hamper the absorption and metabolism of nutrients at cellular level, promoting allergies, illness and disease itself.

Where to begin? First of all we’ll admit that sure, cells vibrate at resonant frequencies…however, so does everything else. Both the cells in your hand and the table your computer is resting on are vibrating on a microscale.
However, what do they mean by “invert the disharmonic frequency”? One can’t have negative frequencies. Perhaps they meant to invert the amplitude of the vibrations…seems odd that applying the same waveform shifted in time would provide such magical results.
Just to clarify, the stated frequency range where homeostasis is achieved is 10-150,000 Hz. Telling a girl you make between $10 and $150,000 dollars a year would probably not seem very impressive.

For children and adults of all ages, BRT is a state of the art, painless, effective, and highly individualized therapy. Every organ, gland and tissue of the body benefits from this therapy, provided some basic rules of looking after your body are observed.
BRT achieves extremely good success in the following areas:
* Addictions: to food, alcohol, chemicals, nicotine, emotions
* Allergies/sensitivities: to healthy food, fats, sugars, alcohol, chemicals, heavy metals (mercury etc), environmental inhaled substances (pollens, grass, petrol etc.)
* Asthma, Hay fever, Skin problems
* Childhood emotional stresses and pressures
* Hormonal imbalances leading to various complaints including weight problems, menstrual and menopausal issues
* Psycho-immunology: Illness and stressed conditions where the primary cause lies in some past emotional, mental or physical trauma that the person has never got over fully

Amazing how their therapy purports to work extremely well on complex, poorly diagnosed, multifactorial conditions without simple (legitimate) medical cures. One would think if they could cure stress from repressed memories as well as asthma, that they’d be killer against something simple like the common cold or flu. Alas, they make no such claims. However, their broad-reaching claims are framed within a need to follow “basic rules for looking after your body.” Which is more likely to be effective at combating environmental toxin, a nebulous electro-mechanical harmonic thing-a-ma-jig, or removing that toxin from one’s presence?
Just when they might be treading on alt-med pseudo-legitimacy, they shoot themselves in the foot with some overwhelmingly touchy-feely nonsense…

Energy is the basic fundamental element of life. Good energy = Good health / Poor energy = Poor health. Therefore if your health is suffering it is your energy that needs attention.

“Honey, my energy could use some attention tonight…”
Wrapping up…
Here’s the original article in The West Australian (which serves as a great pseudoscience roundup).
Finally, a PubMed search on “Bioresonance,” of which most results are in foreign-language alt-med journals, with one notable exception. Hardly a massive body of peer-reviewed evidence.
Someone please cue the anecdotes of how “this worked for my son’s asthma after spending thousands on drugs that didn’t help”…